The LG Optimus F7 is a solid addition to Boost Mobile's lineup, delivering comparable performance and features to the Galaxy S III at a slightly friendlier price tag.

The Samsung Galaxy S III might be Boost Mobile's best smartphone, but not everyone can stretch their budget to accommodate its hefty $400 price tag. If you're looking for top-of-the-line performance at a price that's a little easier to stomach, the $299.99 LG Optimus F7 delivers. It has a large, sharp display, excellent call quality, a good camera, and many features comparable to the GS III. It's still a little pricey, and Boost's LTE network leaves room for improvement, but the LG Optimus F7 is a solid addition to the carrier's lineup.

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Design and Call QualityThe LG Optimus F7 is attractive, if a little plain. The phone measures 5.16 by 2.71 by 0.38 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.7 ounces. It's very comfortable to hold and use with one hand, though I did have to do some extreme thumb flexing to drag down the Notifications bar at the top of the screen. The phone is made entirely of slippery dark gray plastic with a faux-brushed aluminum finish on the back. And while the build feels solid, I noticed some pretty serious scuffs on my review unit that appeared on the back after just a few days of using it.

The 4.7-inch, 1,280-by-720-pixel IPS LCD is one of the best displays you can get on Boost. It gets very bright, and colors look pleasantly saturated. It's even a touch sharper than the screen on the Galaxy S III, which has the same resolution, but measures 4.8 inches. It's also very comfortable to type on.

Call quality on the Optimus F7 is quite good. Voices sound clear and full in the earpiece, with just a light hint of static in the background. Calls made with the phone sound rich and natural, with very good noise cancellation. The speakerphone gets extremely loud; you can hear it outside at maximum volume, though it sounds a bit harsh. Calls sounded good through a Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset, and the standard Android voice dialing app worked fine. The phone has a big 2,540mAh battery that lasted for a solid 12 hours and 47 minutes of talk time, and it's removable, so you can carry a spare.

Network and PlansBoost uses Sprint's network, and the LG Optimus F7 is among its first few phones to feature 4G LTE support. As we just discovered in our testing for the Fastest Mobile Networks, Sprint's LTE speeds have increased in nearly every city, and we saw some very solid Web page performance. But coverage is still spotty, and speeds are slower than AT&T and Verizon on average. Although it hasn't been officially activated, I was able to get an LTE signal where I tested the phone in New York City. I saw speeds peak around 4Mbps down and 2Mbps up, which is a dramatic improvement over Sprint's 3G network, but still not great for LTE.

Thankfully, if you aren't covered by 4G LTE, Sprint's 3G network has improved considerably since this time last year. Thanks to a considerable upgrade as part of Sprint's Network Vision project, the carrier was able to double 3G speeds in many cities—though they're still only running at a quarter of the speed you'll see on AT&T or T-Mobile.

You can use the phone as a mobile hotspot with the appropriate plan, and it connects to 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi.

And while the LG Optimus F7 may be a little pricey upfront, Boost's rates can save you some serious cash over other carriers. Monthly plans on start at $55 per month, and get you unlimited talk, texts, and data. That unlimited data figure comes with a caveat: After 2.5GB of full-speed data usage per month (either 3G or 4G LTE), your speeds will be throttled down to 2G until the end of your billing cycle. But your monthly payment reduces by $5 after every six months you pay your bill on time, until you reach $40 per month.

User Interface, Hardware, and AppsThe Optimus F7 is powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8960 processor, which is the same chip you'll find in the Galaxy S III. It turned in some respectable benchmark scores for Web and overall system performance, but stuttered a bit on more graphically intensive tests. Still, you should be able to run nearly all of the 800,000+ apps in the Google Play store without a problem.

The Optimus F7 runs Android 4.1.2 (Jelly Bean), along with LG's Optimus UI 3.0 customizations. There's no word on an update to a newer version of Jelly Bean, but so far you won't be missing any dramatic new features. And Optimus UI is a very heavy layer over Android that won't please purists, but will look appealing to newbies.

You get seven customizable home screens to swipe between that come dotted with randomly placed apps. LG has added four themes to the phone that change your wallpaper and icons. In addition to Optimus, which is the standard skin you get out of the box, you also get Biz, Cozywall, and Marshmallow, which is a nice way to keep your phone feeling fresh. There's some bloatware preinstalled on the phone, but most of it can be deleted.

You also get all the usual Android perks, like a fast Web browser, excellent email support, and voice-enabled, turn-by-turn GPS directions via Google Maps. LG adds QuickMemo, which is a system-wide note taking service that lets you annotate screenshots with handwritten notes and sketches, which you can then share. And SmartShare lets you display music, photos, and video on your HDTV or monitor via DLNA.

Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions The Optimus F7 comes with 3.91GB of free internal storage, and an empty microSD card slot underneath the battery cover. My 32 and 64GB SanDisk cards worked fine. The phone was able to play all of our audio test files except FLAC, and sound quality was good over both wired 3.5mm headphones as well as Altec Lansing BackBeat Bluetooth headphones, though there was a faint hissing sound in the background. All of our test videos played back at resolutions up to 1080p, but audio was way out of sync over Bluetooth.

The 8-megapixel camera on the back of the phone is pretty good. It snaps shots as soon as the autofocus locks in, which takes less than half a second. And if you hold the Shutter button down the camera will shoot continuously every 0.4 second. Photos look good, with adequate color and detail, though they're not quite up to par with images taken by the Galaxy S 4. The camera also records 1080p video at a smooth 30 frames per second, though there was some screen tearing indoors and it had trouble adjusting to different lighting outside. The 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera is fine for self-portraits and video chat.

A few months ago the LG Optimus F7 would've been the top phone on Boost. If you're willing to spend the extra $100, the Samsung Galaxy S III gets you more features, a better camera, and just a little more polish overall. But $400 is a lot to throw down, even if it gets you a lot of phone. The LG Optimus F7 comes in at a close second, and for $100 less, it's packing enough smartphone prowess to satisfy most users. It has a larger, sharper display than your next best bet, the HTC One SV, as well as a faster processor. And the Samsung Galaxy S II is still available for $100 less, but it lacks LTE, and can't compete in terms of display quality and processing power.

Alex Colon is the managing editor of PCMag's consumer electronics team. He holds a Bachelor's Degree in English Writing and Literature from Pace University and got his start editing books before deciding technology would probably be a lot more fun.
Though he does the majority of his reading and writing on various digital displays, Alex still loves to sit down and read a good, old-fashioned, paper and ink book in his free time. (Not that there's anything wrong with ebook readers.)
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